Ideogram has stepped over the line, increasing wait times between generations to 20 minutes for everyone in slow queue.

[EDIT] The wait times are now dependent on site's traffic. Disregard that piece of information.

Previously, the time between generations for paid users was capped to 2 minutes. However, since 15th of January, it is now 20 minutes. This basically means that once you've run out of priority credits, you can generate 72 batches of images per day....theoretically. But only if you stay up all day and night. Which, if 3-credit generations is used every time, translates to 216 credits per day.

In reality, if you're a normal person, you won't be on Ideogram all day and use a third of it the most, translating it to about 70 credits per day you can practically use. This means that ideogram's basic vs premium/pro plans for unlimited credits (100 vs "unlimited" credits per day) become the same in practice.

Ideogram has made negative changes without previous announcement before (lowering free users' credits from 25 per day to 20 per day to 10 per day to 10 per week) but this time, things are more severe. This time, the target is paid users (Some of who may have even subscribed yearly, only to get an inferior product/service from what was originally promised), and there was no announcement about these changes at all. Not even when the change happened.

Apparently, the team claimed that this is is due to having to the server loads, and the 2-minute cap is not sustainable. However, there are two pieces of evidence that go against that claim.

First, before the changes (even before free users' credit regeneration was changed from daily to weekly), during low-usage hours, the slow queue was not a problem. It was either very small or nonexistent. However, the 20-minute wait timer applies to no matter how low the website traffic is.

Second, even after changing free user' credits regeneration from daily to weekly, and changing slow credits wait times for paid users from 2 to 20 minutes, I haven't seen any improvements to slow queues during peak hours. From the moment from clicking the "generate" button to images starting to be generated, It still takes over 3 minutes to generate images during high-usage hours and up to over 10 minutes during peak hours. (Queues in canvas are not affected, yet.) Basically, slow queues are the same for everybody, with improvement being either marginal or nonexistent.

This leads me to to speculate that either one of these two scenarios are true.

First, there are Ideogram users who are bad actors. Those users create tons of free accounts to bypass the credits limit, thus increasing the traffic for everyone. What makes me believe this is the suspiciously high amount of users with low generations but with very specific subjects. The subjects include Lionel Messi milking a cow, a shark/giant snake hybrid with a ChatGPT-style prompt, 3d images of couples in hoodies (usually with prompt including "Nike"). and, most unsettlingly, realistic images of babies and toddlers ready to fight roosters (usually on the sand).

However, this scenario would mean incompetence on Ideogram's part as this would be punishing users who try to play by the rules. Meanwhile, the account-spamming bad actors get away scott-free.

The second scenario is that Ideogram is not truly honest with their intentions. If the server loads were truly an issue, then why would the wait times between generations be present even during low traffic hours? In fact, before the slow queue change, the wait times between generations indeed were dependent on how busy the the site's traffic was. Now it is 20 minutes for everyone in slow queue, no matter how low the traffic is. This is another example of website enshittification.

Which mean, unless you have tons of money, it's better to unsubscribe if you haven't done so, until the issues are resolved. If things don't improve, we can conclude that while technology is here already, it's not affordable for most people yet.